State of play: one

Fal ’Ngeestra watched the shadows of the clouds move on the distant plain, ten kilometers away horizontally and one vertically,

and then, with a

sigh, lifted her gaze to the line of snow-capped mountains on the far side of the open grassland. The mountain

range was fully thirty kilometers

from her eyes, but the peaks were sharp and distinct in the thin air which they invaded

with their rock and brilliant icy whiteness. Even at that

distance, through that much atmosphere, their glare startled the

eye.

She turned away, walking along the broad flagstones of the lodge terrace with a stiff-legged gait unsuited to her lack of

years. The

trelliswork above her head was covered in bright red and white flowers and cast a regular pattern of shadows over

the terrace beneath; she

walked through light and shade, her hair dim then shining gold in turn as each halting step moved

her from shadow to sunlight.

The gun-metal bulk of the drone called Jase appeared at the far end of the terrace, out of the lodge itself. Fal smiled when

she saw it and

sat down on a stone bench jutting out from the low wall which separated terrace from view. They were high up,

but it was a hot and windless

day; she wiped a little sweat from her forehead as the old drone floated along the terrace toward

her, the slanting lines of sunlight passing over

its body in a steady rhythm. The drone settled on the stones beside the bench,

its broad, flat top about level with the crown of the girl’s head.

“Isn’t it a lovely day, Jase." Fal said, looking back at the distant mountains again.

“It is," Jase said. The drone had an unusually deep and fulltoned voice, and made the most of it. For a thousand years or

more Culture

drones had had aura fields which colored according to their mood—their equivalent of facial expression and body

language—but Jase was

old, made long before aura fields were thought of, and had refused to be refitted to accommodate them.

It preferred either to rely on its voice to

express what it felt, or to remain inscrutable.

“Damn." Fal shook her head, looking at the faraway snow. “I wish I was climbing." She made a clicking noise with her mouth

and looked

down at her right leg, which stuck straight out in front of her. She had broken the leg eight days before, while

climbing in the mountains on the

other side of the plain. Now it was splinted up with a fine tracery of field-strands, concealed

beneath fashionably tight trousers.

Jase ought, she thought, to have taken this as an excuse to lecture her again on the advisability of only climbing with a

floater harness, or

with a rescue drone nearby, or at the very least on not climbing alone, but the old machine said nothing.

She looked at it, her tanned face

shining in the light. “So, Jase, what have you got for me. Business."

“I’m afraid so."

Fal settled herself as comfortably as she could on the stone bench and crossed her arms. Jase stretched out a short force

field from its

casing to support the awkward-looking outstretched leg, though it knew that the splint’s own fields were taking

all the strain.

“Spit it out," Fal said.

“You may recall an item from the daily synopsis eighteen days ago about one of our spacecraft which was cobbled together by

a factory

vessel in the volume of space Inside from the Sullen Gulf; the factory craft had to destruct, and later so did the

ship it made."

“I remember," said Fal, who forgot little about anything, and nothing at all from a daily synopsis. “It was a mongrel because

the factory was

trying to get a GSV Mind out of the way."

“Well," Jase said, its voice a little weary, “we have a problem with that."

Fal smiled.

The Culture, there could be no doubt, relied profoundly on its machines for both its strategy and tactics in the war it was

now engaged in.

Indeed, a case could be made for holding that the Culture was its machines, that they represented it at a

more fundamental level than did any

single human or group of humans within the society. The Minds that the Culture’s factory

craft, safe Orbitals and larger GSVs were now

producing were some of the most sophisticated collections of matter in the galaxy.

They were so intelligent that no human was capable of

understanding just how smart they were (and the machines themselves

were incapable of describing it to such a limited form of life).

From those mental colossi, down through the more ordinary but still sentient machines and the smart but ultimately mechanistic

and

predictable computers, right down to the smallest circuit in a micromissile hardly more intelligent than a fly, the Culture

had placed its bets—

long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because

the Culture saw itself as being

a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of

achieving this desired state as well as more

efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture.

Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games,

romance, studying

dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid

of a safety harness.

A hostile reading of such a situation might lead to the idea that the discovery by the Culture’s Minds that some humans were

actually

capable of matching and occasionally beating their record for accurately assessing a given set of facts would lead

to machine indignation and

blown circuits, but this was not the case. It fascinated those Minds that such a puny and chaotic

collection of mental faculties could by some

sleight of neuron produce an answer to a problem which was as good as theirs.

There was an explanation, of course, and it perhaps had

something to do with patterns of cause and effect which even the almost

god-like power of the Minds had difficulty trying to fathom; it also had

quite a lot to do with sheer weight of numbers.

There were in excess of eighteen trillion people in the Culture, just about every one of them well nourished, extensively

educated and

mentally alert, and only thirty or forty of them had this unusual ability to forecast and assess on a par with

a well-informed Mind (of which there

were already many h undreds of thousands). It was not impossible that this was pure luck;

toss eighteen trillion coins in the air for a while and a

few of them are going to keep landing the same side up for a long,

long time.

Fal ’Ngeestra was a Culture Referrer, one of those thirty, maybe forty, out of the eighteen trillion who could give you an

intuitive idea of what

was going to happen, or tell you why she thought that something which had already happened had happened

the way it did, and almost certainly